Tag: rideau ewe lambs

Thank you to all or our 2016 Alysheep breeding stock customers! We were so happy to have such excellent ewe lambs and ram lambs available, and enjoyed being able to see them go to so many great people. We saw quite a few first time producers this year, and it’s great to see new enthusiasm and fresh ideas coming to the lamb industry. All the best to everyone who purchased breeding stock from us this year. We wish you all the best with your new flocks!

We’ve been pleased to see lamb prices stay high this fall and it looks like there is lots of promise for 2017. We’ve had a number of people contact us looking for breeding stock, and we are beginning to compile a list of those interested in buying ewe lambs in 2017. If you are interested, please send us a message and we will add you to the list to be notified when our next ewe lambs become available.

These are the 50 best ewe lambs from our March/April 2016 lambing. If you are looking for the right genetics to make your flock profitable, you’ve found them. Visit our Breeding Stock page for more info.

When we were getting started with sheep we had a really hard time finding any information about space requirements for sheep handling pens. We made a calculated guess when we built our pens and chute, and in the end I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I wanted to share some pictures with you to show what is working for us.

This post won’t go into too much detail about our chutes and the flow. I basically want to give you an idea about square footage requirements based on a given flock size.

In this picture we have 130 lambs penned up which are averaging about 80lbs/hd. 100 mature Rideau ewes fit in this pen about the same as these 130 lambs. The pen has some angles and curves in it, but is approximately 17ft x 31ft (527 square feet).

Across from our handling system we have one pen to sort into. If we are splitting a group, we are usually doing a two way split so one group will go into this pen while the other group is usually running back to the pen they came from down the barn. We have to swing panels across our feed alley to connect our handling system to the sorting pen, but it’s pretty quick to set up. This pen is 12ft x 23ft (276 square feet) the wedge shape coming off the handling system across the alley adds quite a bit of square footage as well. It nicely holds the group that we’re sorting out.

Our flock is currently 550 breeding ewes and we typically find that we handling groups of around 100 head or less. We’ve found this to be a good sized handling pen for our flock size. It’s large enough that we aren’t constantly going down the barn to re-load the pen, but small enough that it’s not wasting a lot of square feet of barn space.

It’s not a perfect set up, but we’re happy with the way it is working for us. Hopefully it helps those of you out there who are building new sheep facilities.